third february

number two

Jenny, at home (with Mehrunnisa in London)

Online every day I see photographs and film of places near where I lived in different parts of London at different times. I keep a collection of likes on Twitter that includes helmet camera footage of new cycle routes (I never, ever, not even once, cycled in London). Mehrunnisa and other friends send me dispatches. Oh you should see it, they say, but it’s so different and so sad that you wouldn’t like it. I want to see it anyway.

I know the empty city, a bit, because it was home. In the early mornings and late nights I had the freedom of the streets and the routes by the river and sometimes they were, actually, briefly, empty. But I had it both ways because just as I liked the deserted streets, I felt protected by proximity, always, to people and life going on as usual. I crossed paths with the shift changes of night watch and morning delivery along the Thames Path, nights out and mornings after on the Strand. It was just that there was no one else, quite, on exactly the same daft trajectory as me.

At the time I thought I was living every privileged minute, walking home by Seven Dials and Shaftesbury Avenue or running out along the Embankment, madly waving with cold-burning hands at old workplaces and other postcard targets, and saluting more secret landmarks as I lurched by. Now I think what luxury it was to know in the still quiet that everything – everything that defined ‘everything’ for me – would move again later. Give or take a few hours, or maybe it would already be happening – streams of people beginning to flow between St Paul’s and Tate Modern, coffee brewing and oranges being sliced on Lamb’s Conduit Street – the streets and squares would be thronged again. I was at home in the throng too, finding quiet places in the middle of the crowd or watching through a window on it, relieved to be unseen myself.

I took my own pictures of silent London in the before time but in the photographs of London in the pandemic, the light is glaringly different. You can tell that people should be up and moving, and of course there are still plenty keeping the city going, after a fashion. I wonder about the queues for the night buses through Acton and on out west to Heathrow, and I’ve seen the CCTV of busy Tube platforms. Even in the shaky images of streets taken from bikes I see a city centre hollowed out, but I don’t think I will really believe it until I go back and am forced to accept what has gone for good. 

Until then, most of the time, my mind will run on library footage. The Brunswick will only have as many empty units as it did when I last walked through, marvelling at the sky over King’s Cross and Euston, and when I recreate my most absurd ever commute to work it will still require me to dodge around the flood of Top Shop tourists and locals. In London when I went to a gallery, a theatre, a cinema or a library, I knew I was worshipping; I didn’t appreciate that ‘ordinary’ commercial traffic could be so material to me.

Things to remember: Senior members of my family getting their first doses of the vaccine!; An uninterrupted run at making risotto; Listening to the Book at Bedtime of The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line as much as possible before it goes off BBC Sounds.

Things to forget: Graffiti about the Good Friday Agreement; Hearing Donald Trump’s voice again; The state of all the seeds I planted last year.

mehrunnisa, at home in london

i had never thought that i would live through so much history at once. it comes in droves daily and it is everywhere. you do not need to turn on the news to see how alive it is because you can see it walking down the street, altering our interactions and detailing how we are to go about our daily business. history is always happening because anything past is by necessity historical. but this time is different. it is history with a capital h. and because we are in the great indoors with little to distract us, we have a front row seat to it, transmitted through a variety of screens and virtual mediums. 

it was towards the end of last year that i heard david olusoga talk about the history of now. it seemed paradoxical at first. how can history be present? but as he spoke, it made sense. the way we live now is shaped by the past, by those who had power. last year we got a glimpse into how histories from other (often oppressed or forgotten) protagonists from the same time are changing the story. their voices are changing the present but will also mean that the record of the past will need to be edited.  

it has been a long time coming. 

it got me thinking about the pandemic present which also has a past. this may be the first pandemic i am living through. but it is by no means the first in human history. in the early days of the pandemic, mama schooled me in the history of spanish flu. i had known of the bubonic plague but not much about spanish flu. 

this is the question that i have these days - just how much distance do we need from the past for the future to change? it has been less than a year since an invisible crown shaped virus shrank the contours of our lives. i am using march eleventh, the day the world health organization declared the pandemic as the marker of time. there is no doubt that covid is king. even the countries that have pursued a zero covid strategy are shaped by it. most of us have lived under some form of lockdown since march last year. lockdowns are a blunt tool and were meant to provide space to put in place systems that would allow some level of normal life to resume. instead, we have a moveable feast of rules and relaxations, waxing and waning against the explosion and fall of infections, hospitalisations and death. the rituals of old have been given a virtual lease, the experience of which leaves us wanting because what we are really trying to do is to replicate what we knew. zoom socials are reminders of how much we miss presence. whatsapp calls underscore distance. when deliveroo brings food from my favourite restaurant, i have to push against the instinct to compare it with what i ate at the restaurant. how can it be the same when it has been packaged and travelled to be eaten at home alone?

these days, experiences arrive in cardboard boxes. they are left on the doorstep and in the moment that it takes me to retrieve them, i get an electronic mail with a photo confirming the delivery. some couriers choreograph the photograph, requesting that i leave the door slightly ajar with the box leaning against it. this is the way of the covid safe signature. this wednesday i got a flower delivery from freddie’s. it has been my pandemic treat. the flowers come in a large rectangular box with a burleigh chintz pattern on it. they are long stemmed and lie on brown paper, secured with a length of jute rope. there is a guide to what is in the arrangement, including instructions on how to arrange them. this week’s offer brings sunshine as it is a profusion of yellow - roses, la lilies, tulips, solidago that is a feast of tiny little yellow flowers, globe shaped craspedia. the iris is purple but with a tongue of yellow. i also get a box of pasta from the pasta evangelists as a break from the tyranny of cooking. i do this because i would like for these businesses to survive beyond this time. 

things to remember: the naming of the egyptian goose near home by the residents of my building (see photo), a delightful walk in the park with v and her gift of marmalade and pear and apple butter, a few days of sunshine. 

things to forget: an extended nightmare in which i had long covid, all the bad news, badly done change management and redundancies at work.